Assuming you haven't come here for the compliments, here's some notes (all of which are strictly IMO, so I will skip on the niceties):

1. "Create compelling ads at an affordable price..." is way too pale, almost invisible on my laptop screen

2. Clicking on "Business Users" shows "Free!...". This should have a "how it works" or "why it's free" link right there, because that's the definitive question I have after reading the testimonial (which is also set in a way too pale color by the way)

3. I haven't even noticed the Free banner wrapped around the cow, because frankly the cow illustration looks out of place and I just skipped over it altogether. The illy is more fit for a Kinder Surprise ad rather than for your type of service.

4. The service being "free" does not correlate well with "set your budget" step on the right hand side. Also the width of "Start now" button is not the same as the width of the panes on that list.

5. IMO the name is awful. The "yo" part specifically. In fact the "yo" coupled with a winking cow implies "yogurt".

6. The way I understand it, your major proposition is an ability to easily post to multiple ad networks. THAT should be highlighted on the page, and the list of the networks should be readily available for inspection.

7. The availability of the templates is not important. Perhaps I am wrong here and capitalizing on the lack of rudimentary Photoshop skills is the next big thing, but consider the following. The fact that "Start now" leads to the page full of templates (none of which I like) made me not want to proceed to the next step even for the evaluation purposes. This in turn means that I didn't get to see the list of your ad networks and geo targeting goodness.

8. In the light of #7 it'd be great to have a Tour section for those who are curious but not quite ready to "Start now".

Thanks for the straight-to-the-point advice, much appreciated!

The home page can be tightened up a bit - message and presentation. You're right about the text contrast, my parents had issues with that too. :-/

5. The name is supposed to be giga (as in billions) and yo as in "hi!". Basically using advertising to broadcast yourself to humanity. Though, we may have been eating yogurt in the name brainstorming session.

7. Tour section is needed. Working on some videos to help with this.

For the last several months I've worked on a site that helps businesses create online display ads. http://www.gigayo.com Our goal is to help non-Fortune 500 businesses quickly and affordably create quality banners that can be used on most ad networks. We currently have about 60 templates that you can customize - more on the way. The price, at this early beta stage, is free. So feel free to make as many ads as you so desire.

Would love your feedback!

This explanation needs to be on the website, it cleared up some confusion for me. I was franticly looking for a "read more" link or an "about" page, clicking "start now" didn't really help me understand why I'd want to use your service.

An interesting site. So far there hasn't been too much success in self-serve ad platforms (aside from Ad Sense / Ad Words / Facebook ads), but I don't know why exactly. I think that CPM campaigns work for building brand awareness / brand lift, but your typical mom-and-pop isn't really interested in that, and they aren't savvy enough to really make use of CPC / CPA. Maybe once they reach that level then having a template builder isn't really a big deal - they can make their own creatives too.

There is so much money in online ads that you are just a pivot away from major success. Adify, for example, started off as self-serve, then pivoted and sold to Cox for ~$300,000,000 a couple years later. So definitely be willing to try different things!

As for UI, the lightbox really kills the flow of the app. I think I'd rather have the user click on the template they like and go directly to making the template, and have the preview there. Also, most of the templates look pretty low quality - have you tested them out to see how well they convert? If I had to go down this road I'd start with just a thumbnail and text, ala the deck network or facebook ads. Just my $.02 though.

It's petty but I can't get over that gigayo is phonically so close to gigolo. As others note the cow seems wrong, rather too lighthearted and not professional enough.

Hmm...I guess we have a backup plan if things don't work out. Yeah, we may want to up the professionalism.

P.S. To be clear, we don't condone the use or actions of gigolos. And, I am kidding about the backup plan. ;)

P.P.S Thanks for the feedback!

It isn't immediately clear to me whether you're helping people create banner ads, or helping people create banner ads and put them on an ad network (i.e. run an ad campaign). That's just from spending 20 seconds glancing at the front page.

I am in a similar state of confusion after clicking around briefly. One way to approach it is to have a clearer one-liner, e.g. "Deploy and track beautiful targeted ads in 5 minutes" and then spell out how I can accomplish that. So boiling it down to three steps might be:

(1) Create a banner using our templates (and show examples here so I have some idea what you are talking about)

(2) Set your daily budget, ad networks, and demographics. We'll handle the details

(3) Track your progress using our custom campaign monitor

This information would ideally replace your "Free" banner and copy that is the focal point of your design.

I like the one-liner and the three simple steps. "Beautiful" is a great word, isn't it? Do you have a marketing background? Quick, great advice. Thanks!

No, CS. But I think empathy is as important as coding ability when building products for other humans.

I'd use 'effective' instead of 'beautiful.'

That was exactly my first impression. Had to do too much thinking.

Really nice! Some thoughts... Looks fantastic, and simple to use off the bat. Big buttons equals good. Some of the gray areas look a bit light/hard to see on my screen, but that's nitpicking, nothing to worry about at this early stage. Nice branding, and the layout is great. I'd change the "edit" to "customize this ad" or just "customize" because I clicked on the ad graphic to customize, but that launched a preview. The word "edit" didn't get my attention. Next, I'd put the "update" button down at the bottom next to "clear | download" because I had to look for how to update my ad changes, and intuitively it should be under the editing boxes ("update ad" for the text). I can't find anything else to critique/improve. Nice.

> Looks fantastic

Let's be realistic - http://culturedcode.com looks fantastic, and http://gigayo.com does not. It is just OK.

That site looks great too, but looks are subjective. :) In this case I meant "fantastic" more in the context of an early project launch. I believe a site needs to communicate its few key messages to a new visitor quickly, and clearly as well as be easily accessible from a UX perspective. Gigayo does that IMO.

Culture Code does look good. Thanks for sharing!

Fortunately for us they aren't one of our competitors. Give us some time, we'll tighten our design, pitch, and feature set.

No, http://culturedcode.com looks more OSX-ish. Looks like an Apple produce != fantastic design. If you want my honest opinion, both seem to be hawking products that really don't do anything new, wrapped in a Web 2.0 facade of drop shadows and shiny menu buttons. That being said, I think Gigayo's design is mostly fine, although I question what they're selling.

Thanks for the compliment and feedback.

That edit link has been a bit of a pain. Agreed, that we need to make that action stand out.

My partner and I saw this market opportunity a couple of months ago. For a first version we came up with 9 banner templates and instead of allowing the user to update the banners themselves we do it manually within 24 hours.

site: http://33banners.com/ blogpost: http://aflanagan.com/will-this-make-500-a-month/

From our experience I think your biggest challenge is going to be reaching potential customers.

Best of luck.

It is an interesting market!

And, best of luck to you!

Hey CVG.. I know that it's tough starting a startup and at this point you feel that you have done enough work to consider feedback. I can only really comment regarding your interface.

That is to say regarding the process someone has to go through from beginning to finish to use your product (in any degree).

As you can see from the feedback you've been given.. even with people that have set out with the intent to look at your website.. there is little to no patience for the explanation.. or the product/service.

What I would do is cut out alot of the fluff you put in the homepage to "fill" it up. Then add the content on the "start now" page onto the homepage to remove that unnecessary click (something like what your competitor http://33banners.com/ has done but keep an explanation on the homepage) . After that Remove any duplicate call to actions (I can see you have at least one, and also the bullet points to the right may be mistaken for call to action buttons).

Finally maybe ask for any user sign up information at the end of the process.. using the time they invested into your website as incentive to sign up and revive the rest of their "shizz". Otherwise i'd say it is looking good can if you keep working on it.. it can mature into a very painless, alluring process for people who want a quick banner ad.

I like it, but don't make it "free". Make it "first 50 banners free" or something similar, as long as you set a clear expectation of price.

I'm guessing that his business model is to earn a commission on the ad sales, from the ad networks themselves.

Concept and presentation look great.

I know you probably weren't looking for technical feedback, but... your site was just a tad slow to load for me, so I suspect a bit of the "hacker news" effect on your server.

It looks like you've already done a great job optimizing towards YSlow metrics, but you can do a few other things to optimize speed and server performance further:

1) far future expire headers on static assets like pngs

2) use an asset packager that will combine your js and css into one file each, so you can further minimize the http request being made. Something like django-assets (for django) or build it into your capistrano deploy script (Rails).

3) image sprites where applicable. This one is a pain in the ass. In a recent presentation i saw online, DHHs was brainstorming about rolling something into Rails 3.1 to handle image sprite creation automatically... a really cool idea.

Anyways, great job and keep hacking....

Thanks for the feedback.

I've run the site through YSlow, so glad you noticed that. 1,2,3 are now on the task list. Thanks again!

Just a design opinion, condense the logo (in grey background) onto the full content area (in white background). This would help tighten up the page and move that start now button up. If you have Firebug installed, change the margins on the .container class to "-65px auto 0" to simulate the suggestion.

Thanks for diving into the source and including a suggestion!

I see what you mean. We'll keep this in mind when we revise the front page.

This is great! I like the fact that the users are not charged for ad creation and their revenue is coming out of the media buy advertisement.

But is the banner free only if the pushes through your network? What if a marketeer has a direct relationship with many ad serving tools, such as DoubleClick?

It would be nice to see the update directly in the ad as you are filling out the campaign info (header, images, etc.) instead of needing to click on the "Update" button below the ad image.

I could not figure out how to create the 728x90 banner. It would be nice to be able to create multiple ad sizes from the same campaign. Do you plan on having this feature be available soon?

Can I use the existing images in my banner?

Nice first cut. I think I can actually figure out what you do from scanning the homepage, which puts you miles ahead of most startups posting here.

Here's the harshness:

1. The "Advertise Yourself" bullet points all look like buttons but clicking them does nothing. They should either go somewhere, pop something up, or stop looking like buttons.

2. I'm trapped on the first page of "Start Now". I assume I'm supposed to click a theme, which pulls up a lightbox with six balls, stating "Excepteur Sint Occ". Whaa??? Clicking it opens the same thumbnail gallery in a new tab.

That can't possibly be what you intended to happen.

The edit flow felt a bit strange... maybe it would help to put the update button at the bottom next to the download button, or call it "preview" instead of "update"

I think the concept is brilliant but in my own opinion you are not highlighting the real value proposition which I believe is:

Post your ad to several advertising network from a single place. (Although you seem to be supporting only Google at the moment)

I would suggest the "free templates" is positioned as an added advantage and not the main value.

Other people have touched on the little visual errors. So I wont repeat that.

Good luck man! and may the dollars roll in.

I really like the 5 steps you have on your homepage. They do a good job of providing more detail but still making it sound simple and easy!

1. Very good idea, but the name should go like others have pointed out. Try making a name combining words like adbanner or bannermachine etc.

2. Take out the Lorum Ipsum and put some actual words in there. Suggest something using those words - those are valuable words/space which can be used to pull the user to use the product and you are wasting it.

The 'Choose a banner,' 'Customize it,' etc. blurbs look more button-like than the big 'Start Now' button. I would at least make the 'Start Now' button border more defined and raised, and maybe change the afore mentioned blurbs so they don't make it difficult to tell what is and is not clickable.

Looks like a great niche idea and the execution/presentation is very well done. My suggestion would be to get as many of the ad networks to link to you as possible, directly from their ad upload/setup pages. You can even try revenue sharing with smaller ad networks.

This is really cool and amazing. Categories really help. I love playing with the 'Gifts' banner.

Really cool and awesome concept !!

I think you can find a more effective domain name. How about something that includes 'banner' or 'ad' in the name, like polybanner.com?

put your "start now" button higher up on the page

Also "choose a banner" should be clickable and lead where "start now" leads.

Thanks for the advice on the home page. Looks like I need to spend some time researching, and implementing, on conversion best practices.

Any must read pages for conversion or a/b advice?

Why did you have to use flash for the hover effect? Javascript could have handled that in a few lines.

To the harsh-but-honest comment category, I add:

After the few seconds I would spend looking at a site, I do not know what your service actually does. It is obviously something to do with making banner ads.

I do know that it has a silly name, which is a practice I find intensely annoying. Are you saying a big hello to some teenagers from the year 2000, selling radioactive yoghurt, or providing a dating service for the homosexual community?

I also know that your home page uses buzzwords like "platform" and spams me with things about Twitter and Facebook, which are practices I associate with marketroids who have nothing informative to say.

I noticed these things because your home page lacks any meaningful structure to guide a visitor through the basics: what you do, why they should be interested, and how they can take things further. There is no hierarchy or emphasis in the page elements. There is no useful indication of which elements do something useful when clicked. I overlooked several of the page elements initially, ironically due to banner blindness. I didn't get as far as finding the call to action on the bottom right until the third time I went back to look at your page while writing this.

Finally, I'm not sure who your market is. How many people are going to be interested in banner ads instead of using, say, Adwords, given that they would need something worth advertising yet presumably don't have either the basic graphic design skills necessary to create this sort of thing themselves or the business contacts to get it done for them?

Sorry to be so negative, but I don't think this is a serious venture yet. You need to develop a viable business plan, learn basic marketing principles, and then create a web site with much better usability based on those things (assuming you still think that your business plan has enough potential to pursue it further by that stage).

For what it's worth, I think that there is actually a market for this. At least, I know that I fall into the category of somebody with a site to advertise online but without the photoshop skills to make a decent banner ad.

If this were simpler and cheaper, and produced comparable results to communicating an idea to a designer and paying him to make me an ad, I'd probably use it.

You're clearly in love with the cleverness of the cow. It takes center stage. Meanwhile, it means nothing at all useful to me.

If you can't get over the love of your own cleverness, you are doomed.

Go to http://www.gigayo.com/templates/ and magnify the font: the navigation sidebar will stack vertically over the content. This is because the LHS and RHS classes use "float: left" and "float: right". They should probably be cells in a table to guarantee side-by-side display. (All those stylish articles that say to never use tables are just blind dogma.)